We've come to the final part in this series in the hope of putting life back into our lives and putting back the shattered pieces of the beautiful glass menagerie of our past. The only item left on our agenda is to deal with our own Personal Liabilities and then, from there, we can rewrite the formula to bring forth a net positive, freeing us to be all we can be through Christ.

Personal Liabilities

In addition to generational liabilities and the liabilities caused by trauma, the last category that will drain our spiritual and emotional bank accounts is our personal liabilities, our personal sin. When we break God's Law, which is the definition of sin (1 John 3:4), we are sinning against our own souls (Numbers 16:38), our own mind, will, and emotions. In other words, we're hurting ourselves. Sin does not "hurt" God. The Creator has no weakness to be damaged in any way by His own creation. But our sin prevents Him from giving us all He intended to give us. Sin costs us something.

Throughout the "front of the Book" (as I like to call it), whenever someone sinned, they were required to bring a sin sacrifice before the priests as an atonement for that sin. They lost a dove, a sheep, a goat, etc. Their "bank account" was debited by the cost of that sin. Unfortunately today, there is no temple where each believer would have the ability to see the cost of their sin each and every time. Can you imagine what it would look like if each time a person sinned they were required to bring an item of value from their house and give it to their local church? Their church would own all the property of every member within a year! In truth, what would happen after a while is people would start to do what the Messiah told them to do in the first place: "Count the cost." Or like my mother used to tell me, "Think before you act and speak." If it cost us something right then and there, we would likely choose more wisely when temptation arises.

So in this section, you're going to take the time to write down all of the known sins that are in your life, sins that are causing debits to your spiritual bank account and the relationships around you. Perhaps they're sins of your past that have never been confessed. Perhaps you have bitterness or anger toward another individual that has never been resolved in your heart (saying you forgive doesn't count). Maybe they're recurring sins that you struggle with such as a demeaning and sarcastic spirit, a critical spirit, anger, drinking, smoking, cursing, pornography, stealing, not telling the whole truth, gossiping, etc. Whatever your issues are, ask the Holy Spirit to help you make an exhaustive list of your personal liabilities and write them down.

Once you write them down, do the same thing you did with the other lists: pray through each one, asking for forgiveness and asking the Father to break the pattern and the curses that continue to feed those sins in your life. At the same time, ask the Spirit what the source of those sins is. For instance, if you have a problem with anger and seem to have your fuse lit quickly on a consistent basis, He might reveal to you that the source of that anger is connected to something on one of the other lists, perhaps in the trauma section. Making these connections is powerful. Once they're made, they can be prayerfully eliminated, surrendering each to the Father for His divine assistance.

When we take the time to audit our lives and fill out the three categories that can suck our spiritual accounts completely dry, we can discover exactly how the enemy has been using our minds against us to keep us in a state of poverty. When you discover that your anger is connected to something from your past, that subconscious thought of negative judgment of that person or situation will be exposed and brought to the conscious part of your mind to be dealt with. And as I've pointed out extensively in my series How to Get Rid of Pain Now!, when we allow our minds to judge the past or the future instead of living Christ in the NOW, we inflict pain and suffering on ourselves. When we surrender all judgment to the One qualified to judge and thank Him for the power He has to take the lemons of our lives and turn them into lemonade, we are set free in every way.

It really is our choice once we make these connections. We can either bless those that hurt us like Yeshua says, or we can curse them from our position of pain and remain in it. "If...your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light" (Mat. 6:22). It really is in how we see things. If we REALLY believe that He is a good God Who only desires to bless us, then we have to believe that He will make all things "work together for good" (Rom. 8:28) regardless of the pain that was originally inflicted. As a matter of fact, He is required to "work together for good" at the level of your pain. The more the pain, the more the gain...IF we choose to bless Him through it and trust His promises. Do you trust Him that much? Have you been preventing Him from blessing you because you refuse to recuse yourself from the Judgment Seat? Did you know that the moment you choose to refuse to judge your past and instead take the position of "It happened, and I trust my King to make something great from it because of His great love for me" that He will release you from your pain and "work" all things "together for good" for YOU?

So, just like you did with the Generational Liabilities and the Trauma Liabilities, take time right now and ask the Father to reveal your Personal Liabilities to you and write them down. Go through each one and ask Him to forgive you of those sins and to make the connections for you to what they're rooted in and where they're coming from. If you really want to make sure you get all of them, ask your spouse or a close friend to tell you what they think some of your biggest struggles are and areas that need improvement. Or you can take a 50-question test HERE that will help you determine some of those areas that need work that are outside of the obvious sins and struggles you know of off the top of your head. Pray through them. Ask for divine assistance to be free from them. Then, get accountability. For many of you, you will find your freedom will be directly attached to being set free from the lies that were deposited in you from the previous two exercises.

It's a New Day!

The one who has taken this seriously and has, in faith, studied and followed the steps both in this article series and the How to Get Rid of Pain NOW! series will no doubt experience a fresh start in many areas of his life. Sometimes it will be immediate and sometimes the Spirit will reveal things over time. Just like in the flesh, sometimes pain takes a while to heal completely. I have seen the Spirit remove the pain from people immediately so they radically experience a completely new freedom and I have also seen it happen gradually. In either case, when there is proper alignment and the connections are made that expose where the pain is coming from, we can adequately apply the salve of the Holy Spirit to each of those areas to position ourselves for optimal healing.

In part one of this series I explained that in order to have the best quality of life that you can have, you must first audit your life to make sure you are constantly running in a net positive position. We talked about how in order to do this, we must take stock of all of our assets and liabilities, which was the purpose of this exercise. I explained that we have Generational Assets (GA) and Liabilities (GL), Trauma Assets (TA) and Liabilities (TL), and Personal Assets (PA) and Liabilities (PL), which make up the formula (GA+TA+PA) - (GL+TL+PL) = QL (Quality of Life). In a nutshell, we add up all the assets and subtract our liabilities and the end result is the quality of our life. If our liabilities outweigh our assets then we will have a very poor quality of life. But if we have fewer liabilities than assets then we have a positive quality of life.

Although there are no real, quantifiable numbers that can be plugged into the above formula, taking the time to think through and list out all these assets and liabilities as we've discussed in this series allows us to stop accepting our lives the way they are and to move toward real steps for change. Below is a recap of each of the variables in our formula.

GA and GL: We can't do anything about our Generational Assets and Liabilities. They are handed down to us from our parents and those around us who had great influence in our lives growing up. For some of you, this started you off in life with a great deficit that you have spent the majority of our life trying to dig out of. For others, you started off with a net positive but the negative influences have been a very large ball and chain around your leg.

TA: Only a few people have assets in the trauma area. It's only an asset when we handle each trauma according to the Scriptures and consider it pure joy, knowing that if He allowed it then it must have been sent to increase our faith and allow for greater spiritual growth.

TL: Most are not taught how to handle traumas properly, and we don't know how to put them back in the hands of the Father, forgiving those who hurt us and refusing to allow the mind to judge the events of our past. Because of this lack of understanding, the traumas steal from us and continue for most of our lives.

PA: Personal Assets are not the physical assets that are found in material possessions, but the spiritual assets we have and good works we do as believers. When we follow the Scriptures and operate in love, we're dropping seeds into the ground of our lives that will bring a quantifiable harvest as an asset to our future. Every good deed glorifies God and is an automatic deposit into your Quality of Life account. This variable is significant because YOU are in full charge of this section and YOU determine which seeds you sow. Sow good seeds and you'll reap a great harvest. Sow negative seeds and you'll receive a harvest of thorns in your flesh.

PL: Personal Liabilities are also within your power to control. Every time we sin we drop negative seeds into the field of our lives and, by extension, give our creditor (the enemy) the right to debit our account to the extent of our sin. Our personal sins can and will steal from every area of our lives, spreading like vines and choking out our assets (the good seeds that are trying to grow). The only way to stop the plague that sin creates is to recognize it, repent of it, and start changing our behavior.

When we break down our lives like this, it's easy to see why we're happy or why areas of our lives are miserable. When we allow the creditor access to our life account, he only comes to steal, kill, and destroy. He is the ultimate thief of our lives. His goal is to get us to believe lies. He deposits them into our lives from our parents and previous generations. He deposits them through traumas that we experience. And he tells us that sin has no consequence, leading us to believe that it's "no big deal." But when we take the time to allow the Holy Spirit to expose these lies and replace them with truth, refuse to judge the past, and couple it with increasing the positive seeds that we plant, we will see dramatic results in the quality of our lives and will live the true abundant life He's promised us:

"The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." -- John 10:10.